Six metrics matter for a local service business: reach, engagement rate, saves and shares, profile visits, link clicks, and leads by source. Pull them once a month from Meta Business Suite and Instagram Insights. Put them on one page. Review them every 90 days, and resist the urge to make changes to the strategy in between those check-ins. A dramatic increase one week doesn’t mean it’ll stay that way.
What’s the difference between a vanity metric and a business metric?
A vanity metric is a statistic that goes up without directly affecting your business. These are your likes and follower count. A post with 400 likes from people three states away doesn’t book a single job. A business metric is a number you can trace to the phone ringing or a form getting filled out. In other words, it’s an act of real engagement with your business. Profile visits, link clicks, and leads from social are all business metrics. Reach sits somewhere in between those two categories, because every job starts with someone seeing you, but it doesn’t always lead to engagement.
The six numbers to keep track of
At the start of every month, these are the metrics you should be looking at and comparing against the previous month.
| Metric | What it tells you | Where it lives |
| Reach | How many different people saw at least one of your posts. Not the same as views, which counts every time anyone saw anything, repeats included. | Meta Business Suite: Insights, then Results, where Facebook now labels it Viewers. Instagram: Insights, then Accounts reached. |
| Engagement rate | The share of people who saw a post and did something with it. Divide interactions (likes, comments, saves, shares) by reach and multiply by 100. Under 1 percent is normal for most small accounts. | Not shown as one number in Meta’s tools. Calculate it from viewers and interactions in Business Suite’s Content tab. |
| Saves and shares | Whether a post was useful enough to keep or pass along. Saves mean someone plans to come back to it. Shares mean they told a neighbor. Both matter far more than likes. | Instagram: Insights on each post, under Interactions. Facebook: Shares in the Content tab; saves aren’t reported. |
| Profile visits | How many people clicked on your profile, be they through one of your posts or through getting tagged in another’s. This is the first step toward becoming a customer. | Instagram: Insights, then Profile activity. Business Suite: Results, then Visits. |
| Link clicks | How many people tapped from your profile or a post to your website, phone number, or directions. This is the handoff from social to your business. | Instagram: Profile activity, under External link taps. Business Suite: Content tab, per post. |
| Leads by source | How many people called, booked, or filled out a form and found you through social. Meta can’t see this one. You have to build it yourself. | Your booking form, your phone tracking, or the question your front desk asks. See the section on connecting social to leads. |
Where do you find them?
Everything for a Facebook Page now lives in Meta Business Suite at business.facebook.com, under Insights, or in the Professional Dashboard on the Page itself. The old Insights tab on the Page is gone. Instagram keeps its own Insights inside the app, and Business Suite mirrors most of it if you’d rather see both platforms on one screen. If you post on other platforms too, most of the same numbers exist there under different names. Google Business Profile keeps them under Performance, LinkedIn under the Analytics tab in your Page’s admin view, and TikTok and YouTube in their own analytics dashboards.
Two warnings before you start reading. Meta renamed impressions to views on both platforms, and views includes repeats. A post with 2,000 views may have only reached 800 people, so reach (which Facebook now calls viewers) is the number to look for. And Instagram’s native Insights only keep 90 days of history, so if those numbers aren’t recorded by then, you’ll lose access to them forever. The two platforms also reward different content, which is one of many factors in the debate over Instagram versus Facebook for local service businesses.
Your one-page monthly report
You don’t need a dashboard for this, just one page you can fill in and compare with the previous month’s. Here’s the template Posted Social uses as the starting point for client reporting.
Monthly social report: [Month, Year]
Reach: [number], [up or down] from last month
Engagement rate: [percent]
Saves and shares: [number]
Profile visits: [number]
Link clicks: [number]
Leads from social: [number], from [phone / form / DM]
Best post this month and why:
Worst post this month and why:
What each type of content did: [Attract, Educate, Prove, Convert]
One change for next month:
If you sort posts using the PACE framework, you’ll notice that Attract posts drive reach, Educate posts drive saves, Prove posts drive profile visits and clicks, and Convert posts drive leads. A month where reach is up and leads are flat usually means plenty of Attract and nothing that asks for the job.
How do you connect social to actual leads?
There are three ways to find out which customers came from social, and you can start with the easiest one right now.
- Ask. Put “How did you hear about us?” on every intake form and ask the question whenever someone calls. Write the answers down somewhere they can be counted, and don’t accept “the internet” as an answer. Ask for the name of the platform.
- Tag your links. A UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) is a short tag on the end of a web address that tells Google Analytics where the click came from. Build one link for your Instagram bio, another for Facebook, and use them everywhere. Google’s free Campaign URL Builder can help you with this. When someone clicks through and fills out your form, Analytics records which platform sent them, so nobody has to remember. While Instagram and Facebook automatically add a UTM, which you can view in Google Analytics, you may want to track other platforms as they’re not as accurate as what Instagram and Facebook may tell you.
- Track the phone. Call tracking gives you a separate phone number to show on social profiles and posts. If someone calls that number, then they came from social media. It costs a few dollars a month, and it’s the only way to credit social for the customer who saw a Reel, never clicked anything, and called you two days later.
Why wait 90 days to measure?
A single week on social media is just noise. One post gets picked up, or a holiday lands on a Tuesday, or Meta changes something on its end, and your reach doubles or halves for no actionable reason. React to weekly numbers and you’ll change your strategy twelve times a quarter and never learn whether any version worked.
Yes, follow along with monthly statistics, but save any social media strategy decisions for the start of the quarter. Line up three reports and look for a direction. Reach climbing three months straight means the content is finding people. Profile visits climbing while link clicks stay flat means people are curious and your profile isn’t sending them anywhere, which usually means the link in your bio is missing or points at your homepage instead of a booking page.
Pull the numbers this month
Open Business Suite on the first of every month, fill in the page, and save it for next month. That’s the habit you should get into. After three pages you’ll know more about how social media is helping your business than most business owners learn in three years of posting. If the numbers say the content is working and you want to put money behind it, the paid ads calculator will tell you what a sensible test budget looks like. And if you’d rather have someone else pull the page every month and tell you what it means, that’s part of what Posted Social’s social media management includes.
Common questions
How often should a small business check social media analytics?
Once a month for the report, once a quarter for strategy decisions. Checking daily just trains you to react to noise, potentially leading to strategy misjudgments.
What’s a good engagement rate for a local business?
Between 1 and 3 percent is healthy for accounts under 10,000 followers. Below 1 percent is common and not a crisis. What matters is whether yours is rising, not whether it beats someone else’s benchmark.